I get this all the time when looking for vendors for various things and have to say I usually do an internal eye-roll when it comes up - sometimes I just want a rough quote in an email that I can look at when I get the chance. Most recently we were looking at some load testing tool and I had to sit through a sales call only to find out the cost was ten times what we were prepared to pay. I had zero special requirements so why that price couldn't have been emailed is beyond me.
I understand in some cases like this it might be useful to have a call, I just feel I'm getting the sales BS when it happens to me.
I regretfully have years of anecdata on the close rate of doing things the geek-approved way versus the close rate when I get on the phone with somebody and it, ahem, is not a close call.
For me, the stage after finding out a standard price is to perhaps have a call and determine if my requirements match up to the product.
I guess it also depends on the size of the company, type of software etc. If the company has trial versions then it's more likely the person buying knows what it can do etc.
As a hard example, I go to jprofiler's website[1] and can order there and then, no messing around. I go to neotys[2] and it's the sales induced hell I mentioned above.
[1] https://www.ej-technologies.com/buy/jprofiler/select [2] http://www.neotys.com/product/neoload-licenses.html
The next time you find yourself in the situation of wanting a quick number, try it this way and you might get better results. When you make contact with the sales organization, communicate:
1. You have no idea what these things really cost.
2. You need just a non-binding, ballpark budgetary figure to the nearest $10K (or nearest $1K, or nearest $100) to find out if you can put it up for the budget.
3. You are not the purchasing decision maker, but do have influence (see below for variations).
4. A general idea of scope: how many users, seats, whether you are a DIY shop or you want to retain professional services for those things that need to be deployed, or whatever else you think will help the sales rep give you a rough sizing.
The vast majority of participants at HN do not have budgetary signing authority in the $50K+ USD range for a single purchase, and are not familiar with how the sales process works at this level. Indeed, many simply have no purchasing authority whatsoever, but do have influence ("my boss generally buys whatever I tell him to buy"). No offense, but the sales people don't want to really deal with you; they want to work with the people who can make a purchase decision. If you really do have purchasing authority, spell it out ("I can sign for the purchase", or "I sign for departmental purchases but it has to be approved by my division manager if it is above $X thousand", etc.).
Please don't lie about it if you don't have purchasing decision making power. In these days of ever-improving CRM systems, that simply hurts your co-workers when/if they contact the vendor again. The sales teams everywhere are getting increasingly better at remembering (with the help of CRM) companies who pull this stunt, and some are even remembering who told them; they might not drag their feet helping you, but you can be damn sure they're not going to bust their nuts digging through announcement lists and databases to find promotions or push special consideration to give you the best discount possible.
But it depends on the business and the product, of course.
Most salespeople spend countless hours of time with potential customers who don't purchase - it is certainly worth their time if there is even a slight chance that you will consider the product in the distant future. You are definitely NOT wasting their time.
I presume "The company and the customer have different ideas of 'special requirements'" can also be a factor?
Your mileage may vary though, my brain may be addled by too much extremely high touch B2B work. :)
Atlassian's whole sales system is to display the prices upfront and have no rebate. Last time I checked, their competitors (resp. IBM Rational and Microsoft Sharepoint) didn't grow by 35% every year for 10 years in a row.
I needed an office for 2 people. With Regus you need to plan a call. I ended up at a coworking space, mildly satisfied with the noise, with a bill 70% higher, but at least I don't have a 90-days commitment and I didn't sit with a salesman.
There are number of situations when you dodge providers who are just a dead weight.
Full disclosure: I make my living on SharePoint, and (perhaps ironically in some reader's view) use Confluence and other Atlassian products to manage my business.
But then most people are not me, and there must be a reason why businesses continue to do this (better results I would guess).
If you are buying from someone like AR who _does_ have pricing on the website (https://www.appointmentreminder.org/pricing), then you must have a special requirement, and as such you should have the call or you're wasting his time and yours.
Generally when people tell you "it depends on what you need" they really do mean it depends on what you need. If you're going to run AR in a hospital for 1000 emergency surgeons, vs your run a 3 person beauty salon. If you're the former, patio11 sending you an email saying "it'll be $x/mo" is meaningless.
As you state earlier, there's some kind of bracketing going that matches certain service providers (saas or otherwise) to businesses. A 3 person beauty salon won't buy Oracle, but a hospital with 1000 emergency surgeons* would. How can AR fit both audiences then? Even if at its core it's the same service, all the other "layers" make it a completely different business.
[*] are there any hospitals that big??
There is certainly some bracketing going on. When we're doing dogfights for true Enterprise accounts, we're doing them against publicly traded companies whose annual reports filed with the SEC says that > 60% of their annual revenue comes from less than 100 firms. Do the math on what that means their average account size must be for those 100 firms. It's nuts.
There are things you can say to me which will, quickly, get me to say "Look, I'll be honest: we'd love to have your business, but we're not the right fit for your organization. Can I give you the phone number of our #1 competitor? They're widely regarded as pretty trustworthy in the industry, and they're focused on helping customers who, broadly speaking, look like your organization." (Here's an example: "Does it integrate with SAP? Because we would need that." Ack, that will never happen, nope nope nope.)
That said, how can e.g. St. Jude Hospital (not a client, but representative of a few clients we have) use AR at the same time that Bugs Be Gone Exterminators (a 2 man firm) uses AR? Well, both of them also use Excel, right? Very different use cases, but same core need, and the sales model for Excel lets Microsoft offer it to both companies for an amount which is, for the exterminators, a trivial amount of money and for an amount which is, for St. Jude, so far below the noise floor it barely registers.
AR sells the same way, except it is a much narrower product than Excel is. To the extent that "It sure would be great if someone got a call from me" is the same problem for those two firms, we're equally capable of servicing it. (They have different needs, particularly with regards to privacy and compliance, which is why the hospital pays "rather more money than any of my published pricing suggests", but at the end of the day it is the same for loops executing the same state machine talking to the same Twilio APIs from the same hardware overseen by the same geek.)
Once you get into the realm where a quote is needed though (due to complexity of the deal, level of customization, very high price points, legal work, etc.), then Patrick's advice is especially golden.
"Boss, these idiots from <insert vendor> don't even know what their product does!"
Someone like IBM/Oracle will refuse to tell you boo, because they're planning to tailor the quote to match the value delivered. Just kidding, they need to measure your pockets first ;_)
(I'm pretty sure there are people who look at (say) a satnav device and think "It should be able to find me the quickest route between all these 50 points in the city" is not a special requirement.)
In other words, "If you have to ask, you can't afford it." That's fine and I will just assume it's true, even if it's not.
"Selling to your existing customers is orders of magnitude easier than selling to new customers. We’ve never really strictly enforced the quotas differentiating our tiers from each other, so I had poor visibility into how many people were over quota, but it turns out that it is almost 10% of the user base. I built out capability in our billing system to upgrade a user’s account without forcing them to log in and initiate it themselves. Then I built a screen in our admin dashboard which shows all the accounts that are over quota and links them to their contact details in the CRM."
How great is it for a customer to hear that they've gone over but it's OK? So many companies would put a sting in the tail of the contract and charge overages (frequently at nasty rates), or just suspend their account until it's upgraded. Instead it's being used as a perfect opportunity to upsell an existing, qualified - and therefore presumably very happy customer - on a bigger plan.
This is one of those areas where "being a good person" is a competitive advantage and drives lots of retention. Plus, after a couple months of this, they'll all upgrade anyway as paring down gets harder and more time-consuming.
I get so much mileage out of the phrase "Don't worry, we aren't the phone company" it is unreal. Sure, we have hard costs associated with providing services, but I'd rather loses a few bucks occasionally on an account than routinely bite the hands that feed me.
My Cell provider charges me overages, I can't upgrade to a better plan - there is none (honestly, how?) - so they charge me. The result? Last time my contract ended I changed provider.
If a customer is >X% over their limits, you should be selling them something better. If they don't want to upgrade their plan then it's time to start penalizing them for abusing the boundaries of the agreement.
If my cell provider had emailed me with "Your usage has been over your bandwidth limit by >5% we have Plan X for $$$ more that gives you XX% more bandwidth if you're interested, or overage charges will start being charged if plan overage continue."
Heck, I changed internet provider to one that offered sizeable bandwidth caps when I got Netflix, and I purposefully opt to pay extra for unlimited. I've only gone over their highest cap twice in two years, but I've often skirted near the limits. I'd rather pay a little more and be a happy customer, than be price gouged on overages.
A lot of the SaaS companies out there don't have a proper sales/marketing process in place. In particular regarding free trials, too many of them are doing only two things to interact with a user:
1- when the user signs up, send a welcome email
2- when the free trial expires, send a "free trial about to expire" email
Any kind of process to move a user from "just signed up" to "paid customer" is better than no process. How do you move a user on that journey? By identifying the steps that a user has to go to realize the value of the product, and figuring out a way to move from one step to the other.
It can be automated (marketing) with lifecycle emails, in-app messages or with specific UX. It can be high-touch (sales) with a customer success/sales rep assisting the user to go to the next step.
Just don't leave the new users alone.
If anyone needs help doing similar Close.io API integrations, feel free to reach out at phil@close.io - would be happy to help.
With the exception of Atlassian, most of the low/no-touch companies I've seen are pretty limited in scalability - I don't know many that have reached a $100m in sales without having a traditional sales team. As another example, Mixpanel, which would seem to have a low-touch approach, is building a huge sales team. Zendesk is interesting - but I know they've got salespeople because we just negotiated with them.
I should also differentiate between those that show prices on their website or not - many show pricing - although it is often generalized. Many show pricing up to a certain level and then you have to talk to a rep - Mixpanel goes up to $24k a year and then you have to talk to a rep.
Would love to see more examples other than Atlassian if anyone has them.
Being outside of start up circles I was curious why this was hilarious.
Some argue that this may demonstrates and unsustainable business model, while others would say it's just an early stage startup and that it'll correct itself.
Interesting. I'd definitely like to hear more about how this works.
> Ask me if you’re curious about going into depth on that — I might write an essay about it in the new year.
Yeah! Anything that lets me figure out support and sales better would be extremely welcome. I'd be very grateful if you found the time to write about it.
Can't comment about close.io since it's inaccessible from where I'm at[0]. Trello is quite scriptable though and I've been using it with a couple of rough scripts to keep track of our own sales process. This was inspired by an interesting post called "A system for selling"[1] that I'd recommend reading and sounds similar to what Patrick was doing.